R&T Racing Roundup: Championship Time Already! (Weekend of 9/13/2015)

It wasn't the busiest weekend of racing, but from here on out, there's only great things. In the next few months, Formula 1, NASCAR, the World Endurance Championship, the DTM, V8 Supercars and both Global and World Rallycross will crown champions. Are you ready for championship season?

NASCAR Support Series - Xfinity Series at Richmond International Raceway

By the standards of the category, Brian Scott has been in the Xfinity Series for a long, long time. Six years in one support series may not seem that wild, but since he's joined the series, the Braun Racing team he initially raced for has seen its ownership change hands twice, in that time rising to one of the top teams in the series and crashing wildly down to earth as a single car operation. He's seen Ricky Stenhouse Jr, Austin Dillon and Chase Elliott all enter the series, win championships and secure Sprint Cup rides for top tier programs. He's yet to win a race in that time, but for the past few years, he's made an impact on the racing at Richmond.

Two years ago, he looked finally ready to win a race. He got up front early, and went on to lead 239 of 250 possible laps. It was to be one of the most dominant wins in years in a series not known for being particularly competitive. It was an exceptional disappointment, then, when he let Brad Keselowski past late, in the process losing what may have been his best-ever chance to win a race at this level.

Next year might be the year the well-funded Idaho native finally makes the jump up to the Sprint Cup Series full time, and if it is, it stands to reason that a win for Scott now would be bigger than ever before. He put up a fight on Friday, and on longer runs seemed unstoppable, but ultimately, he ran out of time yet again.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

That left Chase Elliott up front, meaning that after 400 days without a race win, the 2014 series champion and 2016 Hendrick Motorsports rookie would finally take another victory. His strong run of late closes him even closer to series championship leader Chris Buescher, and he now sits just 21 points behind a driver that was recently looking ready to coast to a championship over the next few months. Ty Dillon has closed in too, and at just 6 points back of Elliott and 27 of Buescher, he can still repeat his brother Austin's 2013 feat of winning the Xfinity Series championship in his sophomore season.

The Xfinity Series will follow the Sprint Cup Series for the majority of the Chase postseason, and both will decide their champions at Homestead in November.

V8 Supercars - Sandown 500

The Season of Endurance is here, so if you're the sort of person who has no issue staying up far, far too late to watch sort-of touring cars drive for hours on end and you haven't been doing so already, you should really start paying attention to Australia's V8 Supercars.

For the past five years or so, the script for these three race weekends has been about the team now known as Prodrive Racing Australia losing contact with Jamie Whincup in the championship hunt, and turning a fight for the title into a runaway for the six time champion of the series. Now, though, it appears the script has been flipped, and it's Whincup's Triple Eight Racing making mistakes while the Prodrive-run Ford factory team revels in success.

The weekend's Sandown 500, the first of three races in which the series utilizes co-drivers, came down to fuel mileage, and while the Fords had no issue getting to the end, Jamie Whincup and co-driver Paul Dumbrell were forced to surrender a previously-unquestioned lead with 50 laps to go to abandon a doomed fuel strategy. Championship leader Mark Winterbottom had no issue holding down the lead he and co-driver Steve Owen were given, and despite some late pressures from teammate Chas Mostert, the Sydney native would go on to lead Prodrive Racing Australia's first ever one-two finish in an endurance race.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

Winterbottom takes a 198 point lead into the category's flagship Bathurst 1000, but he'll come to the race $3,000 Australian dollars lighter; While the series no longer bans burnouts under Australia's anti-hooning laws, the Ford driver was fined when his celebration in front of the main grandstands circumvented a rule stating that all celebratory burnouts be performed past turn 1.

DTM - Oschersleben

After a few weekends in the headlines when Audi's Dr. Wolfgang Ulrich was accused of instructing Timo Scheider to push a competitor off-track in the rain, the DTM enjoyed a much quieter weekend at the Motorsport Arena Oschersleben. Former Formula 1 driver Timo Glock lead a BMW sweep of the top four positions in the first race of the weekend, while rookie (And son of rallying legend Stig) Tom Blomqvist took his first-ever series win when he lead a second BMW one-two-three-four finish on Sunday.

Mercedes driver Pascal Wehrlein is your championship leader with just two more race weekends to go, and only Audi's Mattias Ekstroem and Edoardo Mortara are within 30 points of his lead. Despite not having anyone looking competitive in the driver's championship, BMW handily leads the manufacturer's championship in the series, 66 points clear of Audi and 71 ahead of Mercedes.

IndyCar Support Series - Indy Lights at Laguna Seca

You may think IndyCar's six month season of racing was absurdly short, and the promoters of the Indy Lights Series presented by Cooper Tires seem to agree, so they've done something about it. Yes, the ILS season is a full two weeks longer than the IndyCar season!

All complaints about the suddenly exceptionally short American Open Wheel Racing seasons aside, the return of cars without fenders to Laguna Seca is something to be celebrated. The series ran twice this weekend in an event co-headlined by the other traditional IndyCar undercard, the SCCA's Pirelli World Challenge, and Mazda Road to Indy stalwart Spencer Pigot won each to claim the series championship in what is the first-ever full season of Indy Lights competition for both he and the Juncos Racing team for which he competes.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

With the title, he's earned a Mazda scholarship for the next season for the fourth time in his career. That means he'll have a million dollars to bring to whatever IndyCar team wishes to hire him next year, and with that, could be on the grid for the season opener most expect to be at St. Petersburg in one year's time.

Global Rallycross - Port of Los Angeles

With just three race weekends to go in the 2015 season of the U.S.-based half of the international rallycross championship "Split", every final has major championship implications. It's not exceptionally good, then, to miss one of them if you're leading the driver's standings.

Unfortunately for Ken Block, that's exactly what happened in Saturday's first race of the weekend. He didn't perform much better in the second final, either, and all he could claim was a ninth-place finish. With Scott Speed sweeping both, Block's 44 point championship lead seems far less insurmountable than it did just a few weeks ago.

Next week: Formula 1 returns at Singapore, IMSA's United SportsCar Championship and the FIA World Endurance Championship meet for a crossover event the creators of the Marvel Cinematic Universe would be proud of, NASCAR's Chase starts at Chicagoland and IndyCar is still already done for the season.